Glancing skyward, I saw the largest killer whale I had ever set eyes upon airborne, blocking the sun. As it crashed into the surf, I heard the roar of villagers running up the shore.
“It’s Jungay!” they shouted, running along the beach. “He has returned to us!”
The crew streamed out of the bunkhouses, shirtless, suspenders flapping. Papa stood on the porch, leaning against a post. The two groups converged and began digging a trench in front of the forlorn whale with shovels and hands.
Pawing away with my bucket, I listened to the excited throng as they labored.
“Ha, Jungay. Could that old story be true?” said one of the crew.
“His call summoned us,” yelled a villager. “The same call described by my ancestors.”
“I saw the jagged scar on his dorsal fin.”
“And that diamond-shaped saddle patch. No other killer has one.”
“As legend has it, that would be him, all right,” confirmed a whaler.
With the trench finished, everyone got behind the beached killer and pushed. The whale cried as it rocked and fell back into place. Wiping sweat from his brow, Abe suggested we all take a running start before one final push. Screaming like banshees, we ran into the whale, sliding in the sand as the black mass slowly moved. I saw Papa get in the line and pat the whale’s head, as if to say everything would be all right.
We pushed, pushed, and pushed again.
Harpoons used to kill dug into the sand to increase our life-saving leverage. Suddenly, the great beast tipped and tumbled into the water. The throng hooted and cheered as we watched the other killers pull their stranded friend free. The Arab and Hebrew whalers hugged villagers as the westies and sandgropers congratulated the croweaters. Papa told Abe that outside of a hunt this was the most time any of these groups had spent together.
“Whaling season is upon us, lads,” Papa shouted to the entire group. “Time to look lively and be ready.”
I saw Figgie off to the side and waved as he approached.
“He was a goner for sure,” I said.
“He?” said Figgie amused. “Derain—the mountain—is female, she’s expecting a calf in another week or so.”
“A female?” I questioned.
Figgie said the bond between Derain and her pod mates lasts a lifetime. Female killer whales are the leaders of the group. He added that Uncle had known that Jungay would return, which reminded Figgie that my totem had come to Uncle in his Dreaming.
“Your totem is the west wind,” said Figgie. “Uncle revealed something else you should know, Savannah,” he added, before I could say anything. “The ancestors are Dreaming about your moth—”
“Mum? What…what about her?”
“Your charity today was well-placed,” he said. “Your mother’s spirit is in Derain’s calf.”
All I could remember hearing in my mind was “Help us.” Figgie waved goodbye as the villagers headed back to celebrate Jungay’s return. Everyone believed these were good omens for the hunting season, for all seasons. I couldn’t imagine a crueler twist of fate than Mum’s spirit in a baby Blackfish. Papa started to walk toward me. I turned to say something as he drifted to the bunkhouses with the men.
I wanted to tell him this was a chance for us to start over. Papa was fond of saying, “Know thine enemy.” Meeting this killer on the beach made me realize I still don’t know anything about them.
I ate supper alone because Papa was out at the bunks. I figured it was as good a time as any to test that signal system Figgie and I had worked out. I went up into the widow’s walk and lit a single candle, which meant “Stop by when you can.” Two candles spelled trouble and three—well, three candles signified an all-out emergency. I left one candle lit and waited.
From the widow’s walk, I could see the twinkling lamps of Paradise, the few pit fires of the village, and the window lights from Abe’s settlement. The graves had shrunk back into their gray pallor. In the darkness it seemed I could run across the bay. The steady glow from the Doddspoint Lighthouse was a comfort. Far off to the south, a ship’s horn moaned. It churned away billowing smoke I couldn’t see as it headed in a direction that I didn’t know. All those lives aboard her were full of hopes, dreams, and steadfast confidence in what they wanted to do.
It seemed everyone was on a journey somewhere except me.
Back in my room, I opened the porthole and glanced out, but there was no sign of Figgie. A heavy fog nuzzled in so I went to close my porthole against the damp air when those gleaming eyes popped down on me.
I jumped back, hand on my heart.
“You ought not to be doing that to people,” I said, breathlessly.
“Sorry,” he said. “What’s the candle for?”
“I was hoping you could help me find those black whalies.”
“You mean the orcas?” he asked.
“Aye,” I said. “Rescuing that one made me want to know them better.”
“You don’t find the orcas, they find you,” he said, leaning inside the porthole. “They can sense ill will, and they know whom to trust.”
We agreed to meet the next day at three o’clock, behind the bend in the spit.
“I can’t promise you’ll see anything,” Figgie said, “but we’ll make a good go of it.”
Papa nodded without looking at me when I told him I was going for a walkabout. I wondered how much longer either of us could go without talking. I also didn’t mention my stroll was in a canoe with a boy my age.
Now, ideas about this sort of thing enter everyone’s mind, and I admit the thought occurred to me, too. Figgie was a right smart-looking fella, with a fair bit of wit and charm about him. But the way I saw it, he and I were on opposite sides of a compass needle. I was thinking about all this as I ran through the brush to the spit. I found Figgie sitting on driftwood, throwing pebbles into a hole.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked, grabbing a paddle out of the sand.
We slid his canoe into the surf and rowed out past the breakers. Figgie said his great-grandfather had carved the canoe out of a sycamore tree with an iron axe from Ebenezer Dodd’s ship. With a heavy wind to our backs, I couldn’t see Loch Bultarra anymore. Figgie stood looking at the horizon, shielding his eyes from the sun. He wanted to go out farther. I wondered aloud if our stamina would hold up when the late afternoon crosswinds put us in irons.
“There ain’t much to see this far out except more waves,” I barked.
As if they’d heard me, four stingrays launched ten feet into the air, their fins flapping with the ease of hawk wings as they floated airborne. Gray kites drifting on the horizon. I stood up on my knees; my jaw hung open, mesmerized by this sight.
“I see our escorts have arrived,” said Figgie, adjusting course.
I didn’t answer for the longest time so Figgie began paddling on his own. We were following our guide’s rhythmic bursts of flight when I finally asked, “Why are these killers so special?”
Figgie didn’t pass judgment or get angry. He made it sound as if I’d asked a smart question. He said the orca pod could sense when his canoe was nearby, the same way a dog could sniff someone out. Figgie had seen the killers do many things that made them seem human. They floated upside down when playing, or hid their top fins under kelp or beneath the skin of another sea creature while approaching prey. Once he’d seen a killer flip a full-grown seal twenty feet in the air. At other times he’d seen orcas playing with them. They followed the Law of the Bay, he told me, and they kill only when they’re hungry.
Distracted by our storytelling and by the acrobatics of our stingray guides, we didn’t notice that the canoe had drifted far beyond the Doddspoint Lighthouse. Paddling hard, our best hope was to put ashore and to drag the canoe over land back to the inlet. A hard bump knocked the hull of the skiff, and then another that lifted my end o
ut of the water.
“I know what that means,” I said, dropping my paddle and grabbing the bow gunwales. If we hit rocks, I knew, we were goners. A heavy wave washed over us, propelling the canoe forward. Figgie steered into a current that pulled us into the bay with a flourish.
When we came to a stop, I stood and gave Figgie a Jack Tar salute.
“I lay down my oars,” I said, in respect to his seamanship.
When I turned around, the heads of three killers were spyhopping out of the water, bobbing like mates staring back at me. Three mouths full of savage four-inch-long teeth that waited feeding. Two black top fins rose out of the water on each side of us. I grabbed the gunwales of the canoe again just as the whales opened their blowholes, covering us in a warm, slimy mist.
“I might have known you’d pull this kind of a stunt!” I shrieked as Figgie convulsed with laughter.
“This is your baptism, Savannah,” Figgie yelped, wiping his face on his arm. “Welcome to the family.”
The three orcas stared at me as they glided to our starboard side, nodding their heads like schoolboys who’d gotten away with a prank. A wee killer rolled over on its side and cut between them, slapping its small belly fin on the surface and soaking me good.
“That’s Kayle,” Figgie said. “She is a boomerang, always returning with more mischief.”
Out further, another orca breached. “During our grandfather’s time,” Figgie said, “there were fifty orcas in this pod. Now there are only eighteen.” It reminded me of Papa and the Dawson clan.
“They really are a family,” I murmured to myself. “Not just a bunch of creatures feeding and breeding together.”
As we turned to the wind, the acidic smell of heavy engine oil hit my nose. The long bellow from a ship’s horn blared behind us. A tail of black smoke from a Paradise fleet trawler whipped at the blue sky. Hard as we paddled, the rusting iron vessel was upon us. The canoe slapped against the black hull. As we spun away, a white-washed section with the words Bittermen Fleet stenciled in black appeared.
In a moment, the orcas were gone.
“You’re in my lane!” a gruff unshaven man wearing a knit cap shouted down at us. I recognized him as Captain Speedwell. “What are you doing out here with her?” he yelled at Figgie. Then, at me: “You ought to know better, young lady.”
Another man spit overboard and badmouthed our canoe. He called it floating whale scat. I shouted back that it was an ancient relic from a noble king, which caused much laughter. Soon the whole crew was leaning over the railing, the toothless lot of them uglier than a box of blowflies.
“Just shootin’ through, mate,” said Figgie, with a friendly hand wave.
“You yabbos heading back to the woop woop?” I sassed.
“You’re lucky we don’t drop him in the drink and keelhaul ya all the way to Tasmania!” yelled Captain Speedwell to more laughter. “Now back off. It’d serve you right to get dragged under.”
I couldn’t have felt any smaller if they’d shrunk us to an eyelet on a nipper’s shoe. I fought against saying something I knew I’d regret.
“Steady,” said Figgie, quietly. “There’s twenty of them and your father at home.”
As we paddled away from the ship, the crew chummed the waters. A stream of fish parts and guts spewed off the aft deck and rained down on us as the smoke-belching trawler groaned toward open water.
I didn’t turn to look at Figgie and I knew he didn’t want to see me either.
14.
I knew I was up a gum tree with Papa. Three days after our berko and we still weren’t talking. He spoke more with momma-girl. It got me thinking that maybe the only reason we talked was my cook duties. Either he was coming up with a humdinger or we were settling into a new way of doing things.
Every day I ran to the dunes to watch as new fellas tried out for the crew. They sat outside the bunks, waiting for a call inside. Each time I could see their hearts weren’t in it and mine broke even more. One morning I woke up long after the echo of the oars left Loch Bultarra. Momma-girl was stoking the cooking fires, anticipating a hungry and successful return.
Everything in the station sat quiet, aching for use.
Watching a whaling station come alive is like seeing spring erupt during winter’s death. Everyone’s busy flensing, blood and guts everywhere. The try pots are all aglow while the quay becomes a forest of bones and baleen stacked to the edges. I called them the crying bones because the oil seeping out of them reminded me of tears.
I sat on the porch near my wondering spot, eating Sunny Jim flakes out of the box. I eyed the bay for a bit before making my way to the dunny. Upon my return I saw the boats coming in.
They were moving fast in silence.
Quick boats meant there was no whale to lug back, and a quiet crew was one of missed opportunities. Each one of them was questioning their fortitude. Momma-girl wouldn’t have anything to do with an empty-handed crew. Something was off about the killers, I heard Abe say. The whales seemed distracted, almost anxious this season. They were acting like spoiled children not getting their way.
Later on, I saw Figgie rewinding rope in the tubs, making sure each boat had its proper equipment. His whaling without me was becoming a burr under my saddle. Like all boys, he never questioned his place in the world or had to answer for it. I never asked for his opinion about my place in the boats, nor did I plan to.
“Need a hand with that?” I offered, shielding my eyes from the blowing sand.
“Not so much now,” he said, continuing to wind rope without looking up. “Later I imagine we’ll be pulling these up on shore. A southeaster’s coming.”
I told Figgie what Abe had said about the whales acting like children, and I could see it upset him. I felt bad about it because I was trying to get his dander up over something that had nothing to do with him. I promised myself not to do that again, but knew, too, it was one I was unlikely to keep. Some people are like empty bowls we can pour all our problems into and Figgie was that way for me. So, even at that moment I imagined that at some point I’d give into temptation again.
Figgie kept defending those black whalies. He said they followed the natural order of things and we ought to pay attention. I had my own business with those beasts that made me more confused every day.
“The Law of the Bay isn’t stored away on a shelf in one of your books,” he said, tossing the irons out of the boat. “Our stories must be lived or my people, this place, will no longer exist. The orcas do not appear because barrels of oil are needed to pay for cricket uniforms.”
His anger hit me like a bucket of water during a nap. Part of me understood Abe’s point, but another part of me wondered if I had ever really listened to what Figgie was telling me. My own ignorance of the world embarrassed me. Rather than admit it, I stuck my nose in the air and choofed off toward Loch Bultarra. Figgie called after me, trying to apologize when I knew all along it was me who’d made a mess of things.
Figgie was right about the weather changing. Around lunchtime, one red pennant fluttered over the Doddspoint Lighthouse. By mid-afternoon, two flags were snapping in the breeze. When Abe got the horses to pull the boats onto the beach, two red flags with black boxes flew stiff as boards. Papa told the crew if they ever saw a pair of Warrain’s massive skivvies flapping over the lighthouse we ought to all run north. He winked at the big man, thanking him for the laughter that made the storm feel smaller.
We all worked until suppertime, dragging the boats onshore and tying the canvas over them. Figgie helped move the shad to the shallows for protection. Whatever storm was coming, it was a whopper. Abe felt it in his shoulder, Papa in his back, and Bashir in his twice-broke foot. A derecho was on the way.
“They’ll be no calling us out tonight,” Papa said, slapping a few of the lads on their backs as everyone headed home. I veered off the path for a moment.
“Figgie,” I called, sheepishly holding out several Arnott biscuits, “would you like some?”
He took several from my hand, looked at the storm clouds, and thanked me. His toothy grin reassured me that everything was square between us.
Later a light rain fell. Momma-girl left a pot of mutton stew simmering on the stove. I saw Papa take a generous portion, so I scooped some into a bowl and started for the back steps.
“Why don’t you take a seat?” he said, kicking out a chair leg so I might slide in. His voice sounded like rolling thunder. The dining room, darkened by the storm, seemed empty. I clutched my bowl and peered around the doorway. Papa looked like a statue in the swollen storm light.
“Thank you, Papa,” I said, holding my bowl.
“Right tasty,” he said, quietly.
“I’m sure it’s delicious,” I added, my stomach filled with jitters.
We sat in the ebbing light, picking at our meals, the clink of porcelain our only conversation. I reflected on many things to say, but the words choked in my throat before my mouth could open. I barely made out Papa’s silhouette when his chair scraped across the floorboards. He rose slowly and took something from the top drawer of Mum’s buffet sideboard.
“I was looking for my army locker in the attic when I came across this,” he said, turning up the light on an oil lamp.
I recognized Mr. Brown’s fancy drafting paper carefully rolled and tied with a string. I swallowed hard as Papa smoothed it out on the table, placing a teacup and saucer on one end, his knife and spoon on the other. It was the sketch of the family I had showed Figgie—which meant that he had also seen my library shrine and all the other unguarded things I’d left up there. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased with my rendering or not. We sat there for a while as he examined it. Papa’s gaunt, leathery face hung above my artwork like a dark sun, sucking in all light. His wide fingers pawed across the paper, searching.
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